D.H. Lawrence Meets Jacques Lacan
When I read the following summary of D.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective, I knew that the history of psychoanalysis and the trendiest type of literary…
Poetry and Trust
My friend Mary recently told me that her trust of poetry solidified as she gradually understood the meanings behind poems that she instinctually liked. This process is…
Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano
I remember the first time I learned Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano, a simple, two-part, four-page piece in the first volume of a piano series called The…
Longfellow’s Poetic Heroines
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most quintessentially American of all American poets, wrote an entire corpus inspired by early and medieval Christian theology. Longfellow drew his literary symbolism…
Longfellow’s Final Years of Genius
More than any other American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has permeated American and anglophone culture. From the idiom of "ships that pass in the night," to the…